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Sprints And Marathons
by Dave
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Marc Dagenais sent out one of his e-mails today talking about how he prepared teams to come out of the box winning in April only to see them fizzle towards the end of the season. This reminded me of a piece of advice I received several years ago. Now all I have to do is take that advice!
The youth travel softball year here begins in late August / early September when teams hold tryouts, make their roster choices and form up. Of course it is more complicated than that but, essentially, that is the routine. The teams usually play some type of fall ball during September and October, sometimes roughing it out in the cold of November. At this point, some teams go immediately indoors and begin practicing once, twice or three times per week. Some few teams try to have their kids do something softball related - speed agility, hitting, anything - 4 to 5 times per week. The vast majority conduct two a week practices, performing defensive and offensive practices separately. Many teams give their kids a break of one to two months, November and December, and then begin working in earnest again in January. Usually teams will begin working outside again when the weather warms up some in the latter half of March. There are usually a few tournaments (often one days) late in March, then a few more (usually two days) in April. May becomes more intense as it leads into June. Then as July rolls around, many teams head off to nationals: Pony, FAST, or NSA with a select few teams going to ASA nationals and some going to those of other sanctioning bodies like ISA or USSSA. August is light with a few local tournaments here and there and then the whole process begins anew.
The coach who gave me the advice several years ago started his lesson with a discussion of a team he coached many years back. The team was a pretty good one. They were in the mix at most of their midseason tourneys. Then they went off to nationals and stunk up the place. They played their worst ball at the very end of the season at an expensive, far away nationals. It was a disaster.
The coach told me that since that day, he had worked his teams always with an eye towards the national tournament. He didn't care what shape they were in at any other point so long as they peaked at nationals.
When he told me this, I smiled and nodded my head. It was the end of the middle of my first travel season and my kid was perhaps the weakest player on what appeared to me to be a pretty weak team. We had trouble hitting the ball in April. Fairly strong pitching kept us in the hunt half the time. And as April turned into May, we began to make contact at the plate but our fielding fell apart. Then as May turned into June everything went south simultaneously. The injury bug hit and we were down to a working roster of 9 or 10 including several of the weaker kids on the team. We went to a bigger tournament and were mercied in 3 innings every single game of the preliminary round, surprisingly holding our own in an elimination game though losing 2-1, 3-2, or something like that.
There was nearly a team mutiny on that squad as we contemplated spending a thousand dollars each to go to a national tournament at which we would be decapitated. We seriously considered that, much of the time, we might not even be able to field 9 players. We wondered what the point would be of spending all that money only to completely shatter our kids' egos. The parents got together along the sidelines and came to the conclusions that 1) we must not go to nationals, 2) somebody had to tell the coach that we weren't going, 3) and we must all stand strong together in support of this. We were unanimous.
One parent volunteered to write an e-mail to the coach explaining in exquisite detail how and why we had concluded this. We wanted the coach to stick around. We wanted him to continue to lead the kids. We just didn't want to spend so much money while harming our kids. The e-mail was sent and I suppose we all waited for the coach to call a parent meeting. But that never happened. At one point the woman who sent the e-mail asked the coach "did you get my e-mail." The coach, a complete computer illiterate, said, "e-mail, what e-mail?" A year later, I came to understand that he had indeed received the e-mail but chose to ignore it.
We were at our last tournament before heading off to nationals and the team seemed to be playing better despite barely being able to field a team. We competed with everyone and then lost in an elimination game 1-0 in extra inning ITB. The team we lost to was a very good one. There was no shame in losing to them. But I suppose we all believed it was business as usual. We were eliminated and the cause didn't so much matter. We were going to head off to nationals to have our heads taken off unless we could somehow convince the coach to back out even at this late hour.
I believe somebody pulled him aside and talked about the possibility of not going. I believed he laughed and walked away. And we did go to nationals.
It would be hard to conclude anything other than the fact that the team reached its peak at those nationals. No, we didn't win the thing or really compete for the title. This was a team of 12Us which had maybe 3 or 4 girls who had ever played travel before. We had one ace pitcher and the second pitcher was my daughter, in her first year of pitching and her first year of travel ball. After these two, pitching ability dropped off rapidly. We did have 3 capable catchers but 2 of them were on the injured list with one returning at nationals after a month or two lay off. Our infield was relatively weak and unathletic. Our outfielders couldn't catch anything in the air. Our hitting was weak except for perhaps 3 kids. And we went to nationals anyway.
At nationals, we dropped an early game while looking like the same old usual team but then something happened. For whatever reason, the girls began to suddenly have fun and to really play hard. I think the moment of change happened when we played a very tough, apparently quite talented group and lost by just a run. We had a chance to win that game late but just barely missed pulling off the upset. Then we played a very weak team and pounded them. I think we were 1-2 in pool play and had a fairly bad seed for brackets. We lost our first bracket game and then played against another team which had also lost. We won that game which made us 2-3 overall, still alive, and ready to face the winner of another loser game. We won that game too but were eliminated in the next one, a tough 1-0 game in which our girls looked like the heat had gotten to them, particularly on offense. Had we won that game, and we should have, I believe we had to win two more to get into the final round.
All in all, our team's first foray into a national tournament was a very successful experience. We closed out the season with a 3-4 record at nationals. We hadn't been blown out, had really only looked bad our first game. The girls had a blast playing and just hanging out together. They had all fallen deeply in love with softball. And I must chalk that experience up to peaking at the right time.
I heard a few horror stories here and there about other teams, teams which had beaten us during the year, some quite badly. A few of these went to one or another nationals, had peaked weeks and months ago, played very poorly and ended up fighting amongst themselves towards the end of the tournament. Those teams came back home in disarray. The parents and kids had almost nothing good to say about their season despite it being, objectively speaking, a fairly good one. The end always alters perceptions about the whole!
So now that I have built the case for peaking at the right time, you might be wondering what the recipe for this stew is. I'm afraid I'm not sure exactly how it goes. p; I know what I think many of the ingredients are and I'll share those with you. But I'm not really quite sure what the proportions are or how to put it together.
The first element of the mix is to begin with an understanding that one should look at the year as a whole rather than consisting of several discreet moments which should be judged as successes or failures. I'm not saying you should go to nationals, though I've said that many times before. I am saying that you should have a target for peak performance. That may be at your regional tournament which draws everyone in your smaller softball circuit. It may be a tournament you host which you and your organization view as the highlight of the year. In any event, it should be at or towards the end of your season.
Secondly, everything you do should center around the target tourney. When you speak to your team about overall season goals (which, by the way, you should speak to your team about often), you should always mention that this is what you're aiming for. The preparation in October, December, etc. should be done with an ultimate goal in mind. That goal should be about playing as well as the team and individuals can, not about winning.
Nobody wills themselves to win in this game. They will themselves to get better and play well. Winning happens when you play your best and nothing breaks really badly for you. Losing can happen when things break badly for you but most often is the result of not playing to the best of your abilities. &nbsd; So your goal should never be about winning. It should be about improving and playing as well as you can. Winning will take care of itself.
Third, whether you win or lose, you must learn from the experiences and use them to get better. Losing is the better experience. Those "teachable" moments don't often come when you mercy other teams or complete a three game sweep on championship day. Take losing in stride and know that you must use losing experiences for learning rather than merely a time when you pick up your gear and get into the car for the long drive home. Coaches must give their players something to think about on the drive home. And the learning does not stop there.
While you are driving home from a loss, after you get home and have a few minutes to grab something to eat, maybe take a nap, you should get out a pad of paper and pencil so you can jot down the things that went wrong and right in that game. This is not a ten minute or one hour exercise. You should keep the pad around you for the next couple of days and jot down the things that pop into your head from time to time. Maybe your SS forgot to cover third on a steal. Perhaps the outfielders held onto balls after base hits with runners on second and third, allowing the aggressive team to score runs they shouldn't have. Maybe four out of five girls were unable to get bunts down. Maybe several batters and/or baserunners missed signs. Maybe the other team was just so far superior to you that you just don't know what to make of it. But try to jot down some things your team can do better, some things that working on during practices will improve their play.
Fourth recognize that no human being is ever able to stay up at their peak forever. Most of us rise up to a peak, stay there shortly and then fall back down. Groups of humans, teams, are like that too. They start out at a level, get used to each other, work at getting better, rise and fall, then rise again, and eventually achieve some peak level, after which they need a break. This is why I suggest your target tourney be towards the end of the annual cycle. What you don't want to do is come out into the outdoors for the first time, kick everyone's butt, take home a trophy and then have that be the highlight of your season. It is OK to win something early but that cannot be your objective so, if it happens, it happens and if it doesn't, don't get upset about it.
Recently I have had the chance to observe several teams at various ages compete in fall ball after just recently forming up. I watched two teams go at it in a "round robin" event which was really nothing more than organized scrimmages. The teams were very intense, one more than the other. The game ended on time limit with the score tied. One team begged the director to let them play one more inning so a winner could be determined! In fall ball!! At a scrimmage!!! With one team not really playing to win!!!!
Of course the team which viewed the thing as a scrimmage, who made sure to insert all their players while batting the entire lineup, who never requested the opportunity to play the thing to a conclusion, who viewed the day as a fun way to practice, of course, they won. The other team looked kind of defeated, dejected, perhaps forlorn, as they left the fields. They had suffered a loss while the other team had had a really good practice.
In another instance, a team played poorly at an early fall tournament. The team core had been together for several years but they had lost a number of the better players who had graduated up to higher level ball. They found replacements and expected to compete at a fairly high level. But at this, their first time really playing together, they had done very poorly. At their next practice, the team was seen doing a lot of physically tough stuff which had nothing to do with the reasons they had lost. The coach was punishing them for losing!
Now I understand the need for physically demanding drills in practice, especially to build mental toughness. And I believe in a degree of punishment but that is in the moment of lapses of attention and intensity, and should have direct bearing on those lapses. I don't believe in punishment days after a poor performance in order to build the will to win next time so as to avoid another round of punishment. I believe all of human experience shows this approach not to work. And more to the point, this was fall ball, a first foray as a team. There were things done incorrectly at the tournament, of course, and those could have, should have been the focus of that practice.
The question I would want to ask all of these coaches is whether winning and losing really mattered to them at this particular point in their years. Do they want to win everything they ever play or do they want to win at nationals (or whatever point they choose to make their season's highlight)? Do they really need to win right now or are there lessons they can glean from losing which will make them win later?
In some instances, I have heard about teams which get very upset about losing, losing ever. Some of the time, the losing is in fall ball and sometimes it occurs at some middle of the season tournament. In every instance in which anger over losing has ruled the day, the team has underperformed later in the year, often at nationals.
One team I can think of played very well at one age level after which they moved up the following year. They were a good team with high intensity. But when they aged up, they faced other goods teams with equal intensity, and an average age a year older. This team was very competitive, playing with these older top teams and never looking like they didn't belong. But they did not win any tournaments. And the stress level of the coaches rose gradually until one day it boiled over. One coach basically threw a fit which offended a number of girls. He recognized that he had unjustifiably lost his temper and taken it out on the girls. But he never apologized. He never explained to the girls what had gone on inside his head. They all assumed he would explode again if they lost another game. The team was never the same. They underachieved at nationals and split up immediately following that experience. The sad thing was this tournament at which the coach had blown his temper was a virtually meaningless preparation tournament. And while objectively, you might be able to say that the team didn't actually do poorly at nationals, nobody was happy with the result.
The fifth ingredient I think goes into the stew of a successful season is skills and drills over situations and plays early in the year. What I mean is, while certainly some teams are more athletically gifted than others, have more high quality players, are ready to rumble earlier than other teams, almost every team and player can use work on game fundamentals. The early part of the year must be used to build the abilities of your players rather than to pefect the nuances of the game.
So often we get together after tryouts and are somewhat astounded at the skills of our players. There's that kid who looked like a world class shortstop at tryouts and then we get into a practice situation and her body posture is all wrong for fielding even the easiest of groundballs. That kid looked a foot taller when you chose her. The pitcher who threw lightning bolts cannot possibly throw a strike. The catcher with the rifle arm apparently has lost her ability to catch. The speedy outfielder runs like she has glass in her cleats. All those kids who hit shots off the pitching machine suddenly have poor swing mechanics. I don't know how this happens but I believe it happens to every coach, all the time. And now its time to go to work. You can't work on advanced defensive plays when your kids are all suddenly throwing two seamers sidearm. Early on, you must work skills in drills.
The last ingredient with which I am familiar is a recognition that it is always darkest before the dawn. What I mean is, when things really look bad, you are on the precipice of greatness. Those sports fans among us should understand what I mean. I'm a New York Giants football fan. Last year my team won the Super Bowl. Just prior to that achievement, we underwent the most trying times perhaps in the history of the franchise. Everyone was calling for the firing of the head coach. Everyone pondered the ridiculous amount of organizational resources which had been expended to acquire and develop the quarterback. The defense had shown itself to be quite incompetent. The season was going to be a bust. And that is the team which won the supreme prize in the sporting universe.
A few years back, I, knowing this, prepared my team's parents by tellling them at some point, they were going to come together and decide that the team has no business going to nationals. I gave them several scenarios. They didn't believe me. Then as nationals loomed and the team seemed to get worse with every game, somebody did begin to say that we had no business going to nationals. That somebody was me. Fortunately, the parents all pointed me to my own words, which I had given them in print. They shamed me into falling back into line. We went to nationals. And you know what? I think we pretty much peaked right there and then.
No, we didn't do all that well in terms of record. But we played well. We put scares into several teams. We nearly made a name for ourselves despite being underaged, underexperienced, and undertalented. As I checked in to the office for the last time after our final game, several of the tournament officials seemed surprised that we were done. They said they had expected us in the final games that evening which would determine the final 16 teams. I was so shocked by this that I wasn't able to respond.
I got into my car to return to the hotel after which we would take the long drive home. And I could not get that thought out of my head for many hours. I think it is still in there today. They were surprised that my underachieving, underaged, underexperienced, undertalented team hadn't gone into the final round? I guess we peaked. I dissolved the team following that year for my own reasons. I didn't want to coach anymore. And it was extremely unlikely that it would have held together anyway. But sometimes I wonder what might have been if we had managed to stay together after having had that experience. My guess is we would have been pretty good. I think that is the fruits of doing this thing right - if you find a way to peak at the right moment, the whole thing is more worthwhile. If you don't, it isn'tLabels: coaching
Permanent Link: Sprints And Marathons
 
Beware Flying Bats!
by Dave
Monday, October 20, 2008
Sorry, but I've got no good softball stories for Halloween. I'm not interested in flying vampire bats at the moment. Instead, I've got a rhetorical question for you. My question is, why do we see all those flying bats thrown by batters into the crowd at the highest levels of baseball and softball?
Do you suppose that these folks somehow managed to get through age group, high school and college play (plus minor leagues in the case of baseball) without ever learning how to hold a bat properly? I mean, pick up a bat, grip it tight and rip. Is there anyway that thing would ever come out of your hands and fly away into the crowd if you tried to prevent yourself from letting go? It's not that heavy.
I actually have the answer to my rhetorical question and I'll give it to you shortly. But let me explain how I got going on this today. This morning, Phil wrote in to ask for a suggestion regarding a problem he has finding batting gloves for his daughter. The sporting goods stores near him do not stock very many gloves for girls. He'll turn to the internet to make his purchase but before he can do that, proper size is an issue. He asked for a little advice but I was not able to help with gloves. Instead, I focused on something else.
Phil wrote:
"I was thinking of X brand batting gloves since ... they have some decent padding. My daughter was complaining about bat sting and saying that her thumb/forefinger triangle was sore. She wears batting gloves, but the padding is minimal. I asked her if she thought she was gripping the bat tightly, and she said she was. As for the bat ..."
Hold the phone!
She is getting sore between her thumb and index finger? Her hands are stinging after contact? Her batting gloves have "minimal padding?" You asked if she was gripping the bat tightly and she assured you she was?
Well, therein lies the problem as well as the answer to my rhetorical question.
First of all, batting gloves do not generally provide padding. The padding is minimal precisely because it is meant to be minimal. You shouldn't need a whole lot of padding in your batting gloves. Their principal purpose is to provide grip, not shock absorption. If you want padding, maybe some sort of work gloves or ski gloves would be better. But then you wouldn't be able to feel the bat, would you?
I'm not realy sure why a batter holding the bat properly would ever experience soreness between the thumb and forefinger. That spot shouldn't receive a whole lot of shock. The only way you would get sore there is if you held the bat as if it were a fishing pole with a couple hundred pound diving fish hooked up and you were just trying to keep the rod up. The area between your thumb and pointer should not really be involved with the act of hitting a pitched ball. it is at least an inch or two away from any area which might get sore.
Stinging after contact is a little trickier. In cold weather, just about everybody gets a little sting when they make less than optimal contact. And very few hits involve optimum contact. So some stinging doesn't ever surprise me, especially in cold weather. But most stinging after contact indicates, if anything, too tight of a grip on the bat, not too loose.
You really should not ever hold a bat "tightly." Any good batting instructor, if you ask them, will tell you the bat should be held loosely. In fact, the way we should all be taught to hold the bat and swing it should preclude us from ever holding it very tightly. Let's try this with hands on.
Get yourself a bat. Assume a good hitting stance with the bat on your shoulder. Line up your knocking knuckles like you're supposed to. Lift the bat off your shoulder. Now squeeze the bat as tightly as you possibly can. Take a look at your knuckles, they are no longer aligned. It is physically impossible to stand in a good batting stance, align your knocking knuckles and squeeze the bat as tightly as you can. If you somehow manage to keep your knuckles aligned, your elbows came in tight to your sides - not a great way to prepare to hit. If you keep the rest of your body positioned properly, your knuckles cannot remain aligned. Something has to give. And that's just in your stance alone. Now try swinging.
To further demonstrate, relax and put the barrel of the bat on the ground directly in front of you while maintaining your grip and again aligning your knocking knuckles. Start increasing your grip tightness and gradually get to your tightest possible grip. The head of the bat will start coming up until it is well above your hands. You cannot avoid this if you are truly gripping the bat tightly.
This position of the bat head well above the hands is not optimal under any hitting mechanic I have ever studied. Further, if you actually swing the bat with that tight of a grip, you would not be able to ever hit anything below your beltline because you could not bring the bat head to the right level without relaxing your grip. Where exactly are most pitches located? Above the belt or below? What happens when you swing at a downward trajectory ball, at your waist and your bat head is angled upwards to this extreme degree? You either miss it completely or hit a weak grounder.
Next try taking a swing with an excessively tight grip while at the batting tee. My guess is, that while you will probably make adjustments to make contact, more often than not, you will end up topping the ball. I doubt you will ever make good solid contact and hit the ball as hard as you might if you have a relaxed grip.
Try taking a few more swings like this on your own. What you should notice is your arms are extremely tight and therefore shorter, you cannot possibly follow through, and the bat head is, as I pointed out, not nearly aligned so as to make good contact. What you perhaps won't witness when you are doing the swinging is the bat speed is actually quite a bit slower. The bottom line is, it is impossible to take a good swing, make contact and drive the ball when your hands are too tightly gripping the bat.
Many coaches forget to teach their hitting students to grip the bat loosely. I do not think I've even thought of this for several years. I probably would have gone several more were it not for Phil's question. I think many of us teach keeping the bat mostly nested within the knocking knuckles and completely forget to mention "hold it loosely" because it isn't possible to do both. You can't grip the bat tightly within your knocking knuckles and when we see the bat back in your palms, we correct that while forgetting that the cause is too tight a grip.
If you spend any time watching top level hitters, you should notice that most do something deliberate to remind themselves not to grip the bat overly tight. I'm not a Boston Red Sox fan but they were on TV last night and the team has a couple guys whose pre-hitting routines show this fairly well. Boston cleanup hitter Kevin Youkilis, a guy I find to be more than a little weird, does this thing where his top hand is actually pretty much off the bat. Coco Crisp wiggles his fingers around almost constantly while he waits for the pitcher to go into his wind-up - he doesn't want to get tight on the bat. Even DH David Ortiz does something which is intended to remind himself to keep his knuckles aligned while holding the bat loosely. What Ortiz does, most other hitters do too. They take practice swings below the strike zone while they wait for the delivery. Many players in both baseball and softball do this too.
It occurs to me that some out there will not believe me that a batter is supposed to grip the bat loosely. That is why I gave this thing its title "Beware Flying Bats!" Before I rest my case, the answer to my rhetorical question, the proof that top hitters do indeed hold on loosely is provided by the number of bats which routinely go flying. There is no way a guy or gal who spends all their free time performing hand strenghtening exercises would ever have trouble holding onto a 23 to 33 ounce stick with a nob on it no matter how hard they swung it. They should have no trouble keeping hold, especially given their experience of having swung the thing 100-500 times every day for 15 or more years. But they don't do this. Rather their efforts are to hold the thing less tightly. That's why bats fly even during day games.
You should beware flying bats as Halloween approaches. You should also beware flying bats when you go to see baseball and softball games in person next year. But more than being wary of flying bats, you, as a hitter, should beware holding the bat too tightly.Labels: hitting mechanics
Permanent Link: Beware Flying Bats!
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